Nostalgia

[Acknowledgement: I would like to thank my buddy Thanasi, since much of what went into this piece came from our conversations.]

“A world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that’s left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.”

Fredric Jameson

I love nu-metal. I grew up listening to it. I could talk for hours about why it was the next logical step in heavy music after thrash, industrial, and grunge. I could probably write a thesis on the impact Korn have had on music, or the influence Wes Borland has had on how I think about guitar. I can’t even name a single mumble rapper, and I probably couldn’t pick Harry Styles out of a crowd, but I think I can make a convincing case as to why Mike Shinoda is not only one of the best emcees, but one of the most important overall artists of the past thirty years.

When nu-metal was on the rise back in the day, people hated it. Listeners hated it. Critics hated it. Metal purists hated it, as they viewed the rap-rock fusion of the sub-genre as an attack on tradition. They thought it was too poppy, or they thought the lyrics were too whiny. Linkin Park in particular. Accusations that they were manufactured by their label, that they were a nu-metal boy band were ever present.

Of course, it doesn’t help that most people only listened to these bands on the radio. Please. I’ve always held that nu-metal can’t just be heard. You need to deeply immerse yourself in it. You need to be walking, skirting the Melbourne CBD and Docklands along some inner city creek trail, and listen to Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, Papa Roach’s Infest or Disturbed’s The Sickness with train yards, concrete, and chained fences everywhere you look, freeway overpass above your head. Let the music and the accompanying ugliness of the inner city wash over you, then it all makes sense.

Now, years later, the kids of today have gotten into nu-metal and made it their own thing, which I think is pretty great. So of course all the thirty-something hipsters have looked at this and are now coming out of the woodwork, saying they love it. Yeah, okay.

So, you could imagine my excitement when Linkin Park released the twentieth anniversary deluxe box set of their second album, Meteora. In addition to the album itself — which features the singles “Somewhere I Belong,” “Faint,” “Breaking the Habit,” “From the Inside,” and “Numb” — the box set is loaded with LPs and CDs of bonus content. Live tracks, B-sides, demos and unreleased material, including new singles “Lost” and “Fighting Myself,” both of which have been embraced by fans old and new. DVDs of live concerts and a “making of” documentary are also included. Not to mention, booklet, poster, stickers, stencil, lithograph… is there anything this box set doesn’t have?

A whole bunch of albums by my favourite bands have turned twenty this year. It’s part of what I’ve been writing about on this site. How these albums fare now, after all these years. Korn’s Take a Look in the Mirror, Limp Bizkit’s Results May Vary, and P.O.D.’s self-titled have all been put under the microscope as they’ve had their anniversaries.

It would be so easy to interpret this as one big nostalgia trip, but really, this is just the music I’ve always liked. 2023 just happened to be the right time to write on it. Linkin Park’s box set was just a nice little treat for myself, and an opportunity to dig deeper into an album that I have enjoyed for a long time. To relive the “good old days” is a feeling I do not wish for or seek out.

But nostalgia is a feeling that comes up in conversation quite a bit, so we might as well take a look at it. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, nostalgia can be defined as “a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past.”

There are some psychological benefits to this. According to a study by the University of Southampton, nostalgia is “far from being a feeble escape from the present,” but rather “a source of strength, enabling the individual to face the future.” Moreover, a key function of nostalgia is that it “may facilitate use of positive perceptions about the past to bolster a sense of continuity and meaning in one’s life.” In other words, that ability to look back can inform who we are in the present and can even be a strength, as opposed to being simply negative.

I would say that this is all good in moderation, and it’s not like nostalgia is listed in the DSM. And I can relate to it too, in some ways. For example, years ago I was writing music in a band with some friends. We had good chemistry, and were looking at regular gigs at house parties, skateparks, small venues and the like. It ended up not happening, and each of us went on with our jobs and studies, but it was a cool thing we did for a while. I can look back on those days and smile, and I’m happy to talk about it with friends once in a while.

Those memories are nice, but that’s about as far as it goes. What if I actively wished to have all of that back? I’d drive myself insane. It’s alright if you miss a person, place, or time. You might not be ready to let something become just a memory. We’ve all been there. But dwelling on it for too long wouldn’t work for me in practice. For one, I like to be grateful for what I have now, and second, there is no point dwelling on what I can’t change. It’s depressing to me, because if I were to fall into such traps, I’d be looking past what I have in the present, and depriving myself of real opportunities to set a direction for my future.

And let’s face it: That describes quite a few people in my generation, the millennial generation.

Not all, not even most, but some.

While psychologists at USC Dornsife have acknowledged the positives of nostalgia, a 2020 study found that people generally to look back on the past and feeling that pull most often when they are dissatisfied with their current lives. “Nostalgia is a mixed emotion,” David Newman says. “It also is negative. We found that people are most likely to think of the good old days when something goes wrong in the present.” Participants in this study spanned some 230 undergrads. Some reported that they tended to feel nostalgic when they felt stressed, depressed, lonely, regretful, or just generally dissatisfied. Others reported more positive correlations, such as when they helped others, or were reminded of old friendships and music. Newman et al conclude that nostalgia is a mixed emotion. Positive in some contexts, but negative in many aspects of daily life.

There are countless recent studies on this, and there is a lot of conjecture on the effects of nostalgia on a person’s wellbeing. Valid points on both sides, et cetera.

Is nostalgia just part of late stage capitalism? Maybe. Bring back a bygone era, attach it to as many consumer brands as possible, and let it spread like wildfire. It’s probably closer to the truth than most people think. “There’s a reason nothing new is getting made,” says Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. “Endlessly adding content to the same well-worn storylines keeps people hooked. Constantly playing to people’s sense of nostalgia and remixing classic genres is a risk-free way of guaranteeing viewership.”

My introduction to “endlessly adding content to the same well-worn storylines” as a broader social trend was when I had just turned eighteen and started going to bars and clubs for the first time. “80s night” had been a recurring theme for a while, and it was a fun thing to go to parties where people dressed up in silly clothes while Mötley Crüe and Prince blasted from the P.A. system. It was a throwback to an era we were too young to remember, but it was good fun, because everyone knew that it was just a novelty.

Then came the 2010s and 90s nostalgia. Teen pop, alternative, boy bands, sitcoms and the like. Combine this with the ascendant nerd culture of the day, and retro video game systems were suddenly part of the equation. And the further away we get from the 90s, the more golden it seems in the eyes of some. I will certainly concede that the production of some music of that era was infinitely better than what we’re getting today (something about how modern rock and metal albums are mixed just doesn’t do it for me). Some good stuff came out of that era, sure, but over time it became more than just a novelty. It became a pastime, a means of escape.

And now, in the 2020s, it seems like this longing for a bygone era is more potent than ever. The question is, why? Is it a post-COVID thing? Were we really better off back then, and if so, how? Physically, financially, spiritually, culturally, or in some other way altogether? Is being an adult really that hard for some? The economic reality isn’t looking particularly good right now. Housing affordability, the overall cost of living, climate change, Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, and general feelings of uncertainty, fear, frustration, confusion, helplessness, anger, depression would have many people looking for an escape hatch, which in turn erodes our ability to live in the present. Or just wanting less social responsibility. I don’t know.

To look back on one’s childhood as a time of innocence and being carefree requires a lot of things in place. Good for those who have that, but some people have experienced childhoods that weren’t much better than the present, or worse. So, I can’t imagine everyone would want to revisit their past.

Some have even claimed that nostalgia has ruined their lives. Which might be at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but it’s real.

And what of Generation Z? They seem to be getting right into the 1990s, and this could be partly due to being inundated with older, established media being sold as new.

“I believe it has something to do with the way people are watching media these days,” says Renee Middlemost, lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong, whose focus is on audience participation of cult film fans. “With platforms like Netflix around, people recommend shows to each other, and there are less people seeking out new things. Our tastes seem to have narrowed.”

And then, of course, there’s a longing to escape from the constant barrage of news from the world via social media, which leaves some people dreading the future. “Why the internet generation wants to watch reruns of Friends and Seinfeld I think goes back to the nostalgia of things,” Middlemost adds. “When you’re feeling dark about the world you go back to the things that make you feel better. There will be some event on Twitter like the Christchurch massacre and you want to go back to watching something that can help get you through that dark period. It’s not always nostalgic things but it is things that make you feel good. These shows are the ones today’s Millennials were watching when they were growing up, or what their parents were watching.”

Sounds like cherry-picking, but then there’s another problem: With no beginning or ending, people are kind of hypnotised into not letting go and consuming old media in the form of binge-watching as a means of escape. I don’t think there is anything positive about that. In fact, I think it’s quite harmful.

And it’s not like the 1990s and 2000s were that great. In the Western hemisphere alone, there was all manner of post-societal stress disorder: Gulf War babies, John Howard, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, privatisation, the dot-com bubble, 9/11, “children overboard,” Afghanistan and Iraq, previously unseen levels of corporate corruption, the global financial crisis, bank bailouts, Bernie Madoff, and much, much more. Those times were just another present age, just like now. The problems and struggles we face now were always there. The only difference now is social media, which amplifies angst in all directions.

In one of his Socratic dialogues in De Finibus…, Cicero criticises the Epicurean view that the good life is necessarily the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. “Pleasure is the feeling of a man eating a good dinner, pain that of one being broken on the rack,” he says. “But do you not see the intermediate between those two extremes lies a vast multitude of persons who are feeling neither gratification or pain?”

Don’t get me wrong: It’s alright if you miss those times, places, or people. The point here isn’t to tell people not to feel a certain way, which would be flat-out disrespectful. Rather, this is all just a reminder that life is spent in the valleys in between. You have stress. You have hardship. I tend to think that what one really needs is the presence of mind to enjoy happiness when it’s there, acknowledge it, and not try to sabotage it (or try to make it permanent, which is different from preserving a memory).

I know I still love the music and other things I enjoyed in my youth. I’d be lying if I said that no memories hit me when I pick up my guitar. I just think it’s important to keep nostalgia in perspective. We would do well to remember that what we loved about the good old days went hand-in-hand with some pretty fucked up things. Grunge came off the back of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, after all. What do you think Fight Club was about? Or Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty? There’s always more to these things.

Humans have always persisted in solving problems they did not create. It’s essentially what our entire history is. But if you really long to return to the days of your youth, when you lived a carefree life, free from the shackles of adult responsibility, I have the solution:

Don’t pay tax.

Sure, you’ll probably get in some serious legal trouble for defrauding the government — the ATO are very particular about getting their money for some reason — but one cannot deny that refusing to pay tax is the ultimate form of dodging adult responsibility. Aside from dodging the draft during a time of war, but that might be going too far in this case.

Since that is not the most practical option, I will leave you with the words of Julia Baird: “We need to learn how to regard and pay attention, to mine our inner strength, and accept the possibility that we can emerge from pain and grow by moonlight — in times of darkness — that we can push ‘right back’ on winter and find inside a summer. We also need to seek and settle upon a purpose in life — something many people seem to discover once they fully open their eyes.”

The way forward is in front of us, that ability to be present. In that way, we can struggle with the issues we face and find a way through.